It's about a dozen years since I sat on the desk of a financial journalist and refused to move until he'd explained what hedge funds did and how short selling worked. So when spread betting caught on, the inherent danger was clear: if you're putting your money on someone losing, all sorts of opportunities for dirty tricks open up. And in the end, as we've seen on a much grander scale in the last couple of weeks, little good can come of betting on failure.

Sport doesn't always mimic the workings of the wider world, but sometimes the parallels can't be escaped. So yesterday I persuaded our economics editor to break off from discussing the plight of Tottenham Hotspur to tell me how and why the Chinese government came to own such a large proportion of the United States' national debt that they could, if they were feeling mischievous, wipe out that country's economy with a stroke of the pen. The point of this, since you ask, is that the current indebtedness of England's leading football clubs ought to be filling everyone involved with profound unease.

Reduced to its essentials, the answer was that the US made itself vulnerable by spending more on imports than it earned from exports, thanks to the erosion of its industrial base following the end of protectionism and the derestriction of capital controls. A similar self-indulgence can be seen in the English clubs' willingness - also in the wake of deregulation - to imperil their financial stability by paying transfer fees and running up wage bills amounting to an unhealthy percentage of their turnover, while also needing to spend money on upgrading their facilities.

In that state, the only recourse is to outside capital: foreigners buying treasury bonds in the case of the US economy, foreign ownership of the clubs in the case of the Premier League. So now virtually every club that is not already foreign-owned is dreaming of the arrival of billionaires from abroad, with Spurs, Newcastle United and Everton leading the queue.

But already the danger signs are turning from amber to red. The price of oil has fallen sharply in the current crisis, along with that of steel and other minerals; none is likely to recover soon. Football, a direct beneficiary of those industries' prosperity, will find that the investors of the Persian Gulf, China and Russia are no longer wandering around with open chequebooks.

Liverpool's American businessmen have put the plans for a new stadium on hold, and the American Insurance Group, whose initials adorn Manchester United's strip, have just become the beneficiaries of the largest government bailout ever awarded to a private company. West Ham United actually lost their shirt sponsor as a consequence of last month's collapse of the XL leisure company, in which the Icelandic businessman Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, who owns a majority of the club's shares, had an interest. This week Iceland's banks have gone into meltdown, which may be much worse news for Upton Park than the team's failure to get a point from a home match against Bolton at the weekend.

The swirling financial currents are even threatening to cause disruption in the Championship, supposedly a repository of the values of "real football". Until the sovereign wealth of Abu Dhabi descended upon Manchester City, the combined funds of Lakshmi Mittal, Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore enabled Queens Park Rangers to describe themselves as Britain's richest club. The value of Mittal's family holdings in steel, however, dropped from £33bn in June to £16bn this week. That still makes him as rich as Roman Abramovich, but possibly more inclined to watch the pennies for a while.

In the short term, football's only reliable source of major revenue is likely to be television. The networks need the audience the game delivers and will pay handsomely to secure the supply line. But if broadcasting rights brought in enough money to keep the clubs in the style to which they have become accustomed, the likes of Mike Ashley and Bill Kenwright would not be lifting their skirts to investors. At Reading, John Madejski failed to find a buyer last year and saw the club relegated.

Football, our economics editor concluded, is the one bubble that has yet to burst. It may be a while before the Rooneys and the Lampards need to downsize, but for the fans of those clubs who yearn to join the big four but have not quite managed it so far, the frustration is likely to get worse.

Armstrong right to disregard old sample

The predictions about Lance Armstrong's return overshadowing the continuing rehabilitation of a beleaguered sport seem to be coming true, less than a month after the announcement that he intends to compete in next year's Tour de France. Just look at the covers of the most recent editions of two British publications.

On the front of Cycling Weekly he takes precedence over Nicole Cooke's historic success in Varese. On Cycle Sport's cover his picture looms far larger than the mention of Alberto Contador, the fifth man in history to win the three grand tours. And, as the media exploit the return of the only worldwide household name the sport has ever produced, it can only get worse.

I sympathise, however, with Armstrong's refusal to countenance the testing of urine samples given when he was winning his first Tour de France in 1999. Perhaps the passage of almost a decade could have changed in the chemical composition of such samples, and perhaps not. But how could it be guaranteed that no one has tampered with them?

Mosley could benefit from a look in his own backyard

Not content with trousering £60,000 from his recent trip to the high court, Max Mosley is taking his case for invasion of privacy against the News of the World to the European court of human rights. According to his lawyer, Mosley believes that the ruling in his favour did little to prevent the repetition of such incidents. If a further judgment were to prevent papers like the News of the World from publishing stories such as the one they ran the week before the start of the Mosley revelations, in which the six-year-old affair of a former Premier League manager was cruelly and frivolously exposed, I'd be right behind him. It's just a pity that the man who gave Bernie Ecclestone a 100-year lease on formula one's commercial rights is so much better at spotting other people's abuses of power than he is at recognising his own.

Hey Joe, this should lighten you up

Got room for another Joe Kinnear story? Here's one from his first day at Nottingham Forest. It was a winter evening and the club's officials were waiting to unveil their new manager when Kinnear phoned from his car to say that he couldn't find the ground. The City Ground, that is.

You know the one. It's next to Trent Bridge. Painted red and white. Holds around 30,000 people. Not hard to spot, really. And how many times must Kinnear have visited it during his years with Spurs and Wimbledon? Anyway, in order to help him locate it, they had to put on the floodlights. If the nascent Newcastle revival isn't sustained, the supporters at St James' Park can try a new variation on an old chant: "You don't know where you're going..."